Like a spring planting, resistance to militarism and war in the USA is growing. According to Bill Quigley, a professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans and Associate Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Right, since President Obama was inaugurated, there have been over two thousand six hundred arrests of activists protesting in the US. The numbers are increasing each year. “Those arrested include people protesting US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo, strip mining, home foreclosures, nuclear weapons, immigration policies, police brutality, mistreatment of hotel workers, budget cutbacks, Blackwater, the mistreatment of Bradley Manning, and right wing efforts to cut back collective bargaining.” Perhaps Americans are waking up and realizing that voting by nonviolent action and civil disobedience is needed for change. Obama talked ‘change’ but those risking arrest are making change.

My major fear is that the good causes to seek change grow each day and perhaps can dilute a mass movement for a specific change, like ending the war in Afghanistan. Just today friends by phone or email told me about a number of activities from a local protest of the proposed “concealed gun and carry” to a petition and phone call drive to congress to stop a bill that includes a new law for unchecked executive war authority.

There has been a record number of tornados this year and sadly there is still many more to come. There are more and more man-made violence, wars, killing, drone attacks, and, disasters. There are more causes to protest and more resistance by more people to the growing wars and injustices. Where will all this end. Perhaps T.S. Elliot got it right in the poem below “The Hollow Men” when he says the world will end “Not with a bang but a whimper.”

The Hollow Men by T.S. Elliot

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer —

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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